Google Street View Coverage Disparity

Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides interactive panoramas from positions along many streets in the world. It was launched in 2007 in several cities in the United States, and has since expanded to include cities and rural areas worldwide. Streets with Street View imagery available are shown as blue lines on Google Maps.

Google Street View displays interactively panoramas of stitched VR photographs. Most photography is done by car, but some is done by tricycle, boat, snowmobile, and underwater apparatus, as well as on foot.

As of August 2021 however, not all the countries have received an equal coverage, which can be seen from the following images taken from Google Maps

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Looking at the global level, one might put forward the hypothesis that those countries which have full street view coverage belong to the 'Developed" countries block. Others might argue that there may be other factors in play here - like the ease of access for Google to map the streets because of terrorism, govt. policies, privacy laws, societal temperament etc. Some others might say it is just a matter of time.

Well, leaving aside the aspect of time, let us focus on the other two hypotheses. Let's try to answer what all these countires have in common that might help us understand the cause of this disparity. We are going to evaluate these two groups of countries - covered and uncovered quantitatively on Development Level and also briefly qualitatively on some possible factors.


We will be commparing a manually compiled list of the names of these street view covered countires with the countries database taken from the UNDP Data center (http://hdr.undp.org/en/data). A few points about this dataset:


The Dataset contains the following fields:

Finally, some average benchmark values for the above metrics:

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Overview of the Relationships

As can be seen from the above graphs, the street view covered countires tend to have (as compared to street view uncovered countries):

Makes you wonder...

How Each Field Relates to Every Other Field - A More Detailed Comparison

The above one by one comparison also tells the same story as mentioned previously

General Investigation into the Correlation of Different Fields

Logical trends are seen here:

Conclusion

On the surface, it might seem that this street-view feature is available mostly in the well-to-do countries, however there might be some deep underlying obstacles for Google to carry out this mission. All of this seeming disparity in coverage may basically boil down to these certain factors:

In any case, this is a wonderful feature provided by Google to see distant lands from the comfort of your home, and surely it is going to increase its reach in the future - for which we might have to be patient. And with that, this marks the end of this brief analysis.